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Although playwright Katori Hall is widely known and respected for work such as The Mountaintop — which chronicled the last night of Martin Luther King Jr. — the exuberant Tony Award-winner Tina: The Tina Turner Musical and the locally filmed TV series P-Valley, it was her play The Hot Wing King that landed her a 2021 Pulitzer Prize. The comedy drama takes stage at the Alliance Theatre on February 10.
This Atlanta engagement is not only the Southeastern premiere but also marks the first time Hall herself has directed the play. In it, Cordell (Bjorn DuPaty), his boyfriend Dwayne (Calvin Thompson) and their Memphis friends are getting ready for the annual culinary event known as the Hot Wang Festival, with Cordell looking to claim the top prize. Yet when a family emergency takes place, winning takes a decided back seat.
Also in the cast are Nicco Annan as Big Charles — a role the performer originated in the off-Broadway version — Myles Alexander Evans as EJ, Armand Fields as Isom and Jay Jones as TJ.
The Hot Wing King is especially personal for Hall, who wanted to write a play about Black gay men. It’s based on her own brother’s experiences. “I feel like I have been working and writing this play my entire life, to be a witness to everything (my brother) has experienced as a gay Black man living in Memphis and to see and watch him fall in love — and a complicated love,” she says. “There are a lot of facts that I have been inspired by — his partner had a whole heterosexual life before, and to see him step into his true identity and self has been hugely inspiring to me. [I thought], if I am a witness to this amazing transformation of these two people who are so important to me in my life, just imagine what the audience will feel and experience.”
Often, Hall uses her own lived-in experiences and the experiences of others to create stories. That’s why she feels there is a ring of authenticity to her work, yet there are other times she takes artistic license as well.
Steve H. Broadnax III, who directed the first version of the play, actually encouraged Hall to move forward with the project. “I talked to him about how I wanted to turn this into a play, and he said I had to do it because there is a dearth of work about Black queer men in the American theater. Of course, I thought ‘I’m not a Black gay man,’ but I do think of myself as an ally, and my identity as a Black woman is a reason I feel I can be an ally with those in the LGBTQ community.”
The Hot Wing King opened off-Broadway in 2020 but closed shortly afterward due to Covid. It means a lot to Hall to be able to present this work in Atlanta. “[The city] has always been this beacon for queer people across the board in the American South. It felt like the New York of the South, a more liberal city where those in the community could be very honest and free even though there have been challenges to deal with. It is the American South, and yet it’s always been this special city where there is some transparency to dance with. The significance of having its Southeastern premiere here is to honor the fact that this city has been a beacon for a lot of queer people in this region.”
She’s admittedly not well-versed in all the productions the Alliance has staged about queer Black folks but is optimistic this production will lead to other similar-themed projects. “I do know there has been a lot of work that has centered Blackness but this intersectionality — I don’t know if they have done it. I am not saying it is the first. It feels we are breaking ground and cultivating an audience that we all know is here in Atlanta and bringing people into this spiritual space to see themselves reflected. I hope it creates an opening for more work to premiere here. I do know that there is work like this that does exist.”
Ironically, just as The Hot Wing King is premiering locally, Tina: The Tina Turner Musical is also making its debut shortly at the Fox Theatre courtesy of Broadway in Atlanta. Hall notes she knows nothing about her schedule. “I just write and roll,” she laughs.
She just finished the first script of the third season of P-Valley and is very proud of the direction the series is taking, but having worked almost nonstop of late, she would love a pause sometime in the near future.
One of the aspects Annan enjoys about The Hot Wing King, as fitting in what the actor deems the Katori Hall universe, is the intersectionality of different communities. “There are heterosexuals, homosexuals, questioning, transitioning, males all of a certain mindset,” Annan says. “The journey we go on is one a lot of people, regardless of race, region or gender, can identify with. The construct of family is one that is consistently being analyzed and torn apart and reconstructed in different ways to make the human experience what we want it to be.”
The cast is relishing the depth of their characters. Fields calls Isom someone who can unapologetically tell the truth and alternate between strong and fierce and soft and vulnerable, while DuPaty calls all of the characters complex and three-dimensional. “I love Cordell because he is a flawed individual, like most of us are,” the performer says. “I love that I get to go on this journey of self-discovery and self-love. The nuances of what we can be as Black men don’t have to fall into one thing or the other.”
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Jim Farmer covers theater and film for ArtsATL. A graduate of the University of Georgia, he has written about the arts for 30-plus years. Jim is the festival director of Out on Film, Atlanta’s LGBTQ film festival. He lives in Avondale Estates with his husband, Craig, and dog, Douglas.
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